Brick calculator
Type the wall's length and height and take off the openings. You get the bricks to order, the mortar, the bags of cement and the sand.
Put these calculators on your phone, free
They work like an app from your home screen, even with no signal on site. On an iPhone: tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. On Android: tap the menu (⋮), then Add to Home screen or Install app.
The free SiteHelm phone app for iPhone and Android is on its way, with every calculator in it. Tell me when it's out
Do more with SiteHelm PRO
Measure the walls straight off the drawing with Take-off, and the bricks, mortar and ties go into a material order or your quote. Save it to the job, so the next price starts from this one.
Free on your phone. Every builders' calculator will be free in the SiteHelm phone app for iPhone and Android, coming soon. Tell me when it's out.
Every builders' calculator is in SiteHelm PRO for your Windows PC, alongside take-off, RAMS, quotes, invoices and 40+ more tools. The first 100 get a free 1-year licence.
Worked example
A garden wall 6 m long and 2.4 m high, with a 2.2 m² gateway, in one skin of standard bricks with 10 mm joints and a 1:4 mortar:
760 bricks to order
- 12.20 m² of wall
- 59.3 bricks per m² of one skin (723 before waste)
- 0.24 m³ of mortar
- 4 bags of cement (25 kg) and 0.40 tonnes of building sand at 1:4
How the sum works
A standard UK brick is 215 × 102.5 × 65 mm. With a 10 mm joint each brick takes up 225 × 75 mm of wall, so a square metre of one skin takes 1,000,000 ÷ (225 × 75) = 59.3 bricks. Most people round that to 60.
The calculator takes the openings off the wall area, multiplies by the bricks per m² and the number of skins, then adds the waste and rounds up.
Mortar, cement and sand
The mortar is the space the joints fill, plus 10 percent. Dry materials bulk down when water is added, so the calculator allows 1.33 m³ of dry mix for each m³ of mortar, then splits it by the mix: at 1:4, one part cement to four parts sand.
Cement is counted in 25 kg bags (about 1,440 kg per m³) and sand in tonnes (about 1.6 tonnes per m³). Your mix comes from the specification or the engineer: 1:4 and 1:5 are common for general brickwork above ground.
Before you order
Check the brick size on the supplier's sheet: some bricks, and most imported ones, are not 215 × 65 mm. Add more waste for facing bricks with lots of cuts, and for a mix of colours that needs blending from several packs.